TY - JOUR
AU - Lazear,Edward P.
AU - Shaw,Kathryn L.
AU - Stanton,Christopher
TI - Making Do With Less: Working Harder During Recessions
JF - National Bureau of Economic Research Working Paper Series
VL - No. 19328
PY - 2013
Y2 - August 2013
DO - 10.3386/w19328
UR - http://www.nber.org/papers/w19328
L1 - http://www.nber.org/papers/w19328.pdf
N1 - Author contact info:
Edward P. Lazear
Graduate School of Business
Stanford University
Stanford, CA 94305
Tel: 650/723-9136
Fax: 650/723-0498
E-Mail: lazear@stanford.edu
Kathryn L. Shaw
Graduate School of Business
Stanford University
Stanford, CA 94305-5015
Tel: 650/725-4168
Fax: 650/725-0468
E-Mail: kathryns@stanford.edu
Christopher T. Stanton
210 Rock Center
Harvard University
Harvard Business School
Boston, MA 02163
Tel: 857-415-0000
E-Mail: christopher.t.stanton@gmail.com
M1 - published as Edward P. Lazear, Kathryn L. Shaw, Christopher Stanton. "Making Do With Less: Working Harder during Recessions," in David Card and Alexandre Mas, organizers, "Labor Markets in the Aftermath of the Great Recession" Journal of Labor Economics, Volume 34, Number S1, part 2 (2016)
AB - There are two obvious possibilities that can account for the rise in productivity during recent recessions. The first is that the decline in the workforce was not random, and that the average worker was of higher quality during the recession than in the preceding period. The second is that each worker produced more while holding worker quality constant. We call the second effect, "making do with less," that is, getting more effort from fewer workers. Using data spanning June 2006 to May 2010 on individual worker productivity from a large firm, it is possible to measure the increase in productivity due to effort and sorting. For this firm, the second effect--that workers' effort increases--dominates the first effect--that the composition of the workforce differs over the business cycle.
ER -